


The Sky is Big and Blue and Empty

by ElephantKhaleesi



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Career Ending Injuries, Eating Disorders, Happy Ending, M/M, Mental Illness, So then this happened, i was going to write something for gay porn hard but, im sorry, when i actually tired to write i was too sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 11:17:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10661457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElephantKhaleesi/pseuds/ElephantKhaleesi
Summary: At first he doesn’t remember, but it filters down, in fits and bursts of painful recollection. He curls around his pillow, and tries to go back to sleep. Sometimes it’s nicer to forget.





	The Sky is Big and Blue and Empty

**Author's Note:**

> Mental Illness: A male character goes through depression after a significant life change.
> 
> Eating Disorders/Self Harm/Self Destructive Behaviors: While never directly addressed, a male character stops eating regularly, stops taking prescribed pain medication, and isolates himself from his social support systems.
> 
> Career Ending Injuries: Again, the actual incident of injury is never directly addressed or described, but this entire fic is about a male character suffering a career ending injury, and the resulting fallout.

At first he doesn’t remember, but it filters down, in fits and bursts of painful recollection. He curls around his pillow, and tries to go back to sleep. Sometimes it’s nicer to forget. 

When he wakes next, it is without a pharmaceutically induced haze, and he remembers, but he tells himself that it’s already getting easier, that the worst is behind. He makes himself a cup of coffee that he doesn’t drink, and considers making eggs before disregarding it as too much work. He sits at his kitchen table. He cries. 

It’s odd now. Empty. He feels like he should be somewhere or doing something. He doesn’t have anything left that he can do. His wrist hurts, and his back, and his knee. He can’t remember if they always hurt this much. He thinks he remembers the achy hollowness in his wrist after a game, the painful stretch of his lower back after a shot too hard, the twinge in his knee getting over the boards, but even at his body's worst, he welcomed the pain. It was the hurt of a job well done, the ache of a game well played, and he can’t remember now how badly it hurt to overexert his muscles and joints, he can only remember how good it all felt. 

Now his body hurts and he has nothing to show for it. 

He takes his pills. He tells himself it's to help with the pain, but he finds himself savoring his confusion in the early morning, when he is just drowsy enough, just medicated enough that it's hard to think, hard to remember. The mornings become steadily clearer. He takes his pills. After a little while, he stops.

His wrist hurts.

He thinks about calling Jonny. He thinks about texting Temi. His thumb hovers over Sharpy’s dumb contact photo, four, five times a day. He sits at his kitchen table. He cries.

He watches the Hallmark channel, and bares no shame while he wallows. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he sits and he stares at the moving pixels on his TV screen. His sister calls him one day and tells him that he needs to get out again, that he’s wasting away. He doesn’t think there’s anything left to go to waste. 

There are days when he wakes up, to a sun already low in the sky, and a silence that is so much more pervasive and painful than any of his old aches that he screams. Afterwards he feels stupid and obnoxious, wishes he could take back the noise. 

He finds himself staring at his bedroom door. He doesn’t think he ever bothered to notice it before. To really look at it. 

He doesn’t call Jonny, or Sharpy. He doesn’t watch the games, or follow the rankings. He ignores it all, while the remaining warmth of summer truly dies out and the cold of winter falls over the city and paints it white. He looks at his bedroom door, and makes coffee that he doesn’t drink, and watches the Hallmark channel, and sits at his kitchen table. He cries.

One day he realizes that he must be dead. He’s a ghost now, haunting his old home. He’s transparent and when he looks into his bathroom mirror, for the first time in a long time, sees that he’s nothing more than a skeleton. 

He stops crying. Ghosts can’t cry, can they?

He waits for the snow to melt to dew, then realizes his air conditioning is on at full blast, and it's June. For the first time, in a long time, he thinks about hockey. He wonders if they made it to the playoffs. If they made it to the finals. He doesn’t check.

He decides to wait for the heat to give way to the cold. He sits at his kitchen table, a full mug of black coffee in front of him, his TV crackles with a commercial for vacuums. He doesn’t cry. The achy, hollowness of his wrist has spread and emptied out the rest of him. He doesn’t know when that happened. 

His front door opens, and Jonny walks in. He has a moment where he isn't sure if the man filling out his doorway is real. He's scared. He's not sure whether Jonny is like a mirage summoned up in the desert by a dying man, or if he's really standing there, breathing the stale air of his apartment, and he's not sure which he'd prefer. Which is less fear inducing. He feels frozen to his seat, and he takes a moment to process. He forgot he gave Jonny a key. He’s dodged skype requests from his sisters and parents, contenting them only with the occasional phone call. They don’t like it, but they’re too afraid to push the matter, so they give him his space reluctantly. The only person he’s seen in the last few months has been his peapod delivery woman. 

He realizes then, with a small surge of panic in his chest, that he hasn’t seen Jonny in nearly a full year. He hasn’t spoken to Jonny in a full year. He hasn’t spoken to anyone. His hand grips the coffee mug tighter, his knuckles are white against the blue ceramic. Jonny is staring at him. He can’t bring himself to look at his face, so his gaze turns to his coffee, and he tries to relax his grip.

Eventually Jonny says, “You’ve lost weight.”

He's real. He knows what the first words of out Jonny's mouth would be, if he was a dream. Those were not them. He stays staring into his coffee, but his gaze is pulled to the thinness of his fingers, the prominence of his wrist bone. He forces the cup to his lips, and drinks. It’s cold and foul, but he swallows more to save face than anything else.

“Pat.”

He finally drags his gaze up to Jonny’s face and tries to speak. There is a moment of confusion, and then he clears his rusty throat, when he does speak his voice sounds strange. He can’t tell if it is gravelly from disuse or if it’s just been a while since he's heard it. He tries to remember the last time he talked to Erica, it feels like it was just the other day. He's not so sure now.

Jonny stops him before he can say much, and honestly he can’t even remember what he was saying anymore, with a hand on his shoulder. The touch feels like too much, it itches where Jonny’s hand is clutched tight around his thin shoulder. Jonny looks sad.

“I thought you needed space, we were trying to give you time.”

Jonny leans closer and pulls Patrick into a bruising hug, and Patrick tucks his face into Jonny’s shoulder and cries. He doesn’t stop. He misses hockey. He thinks that, maybe, he wants to watch a game.

Patrick skypes his family. He texts his old teammates, and calls Sharpy. He cries more. He stops making coffee. He learns to make tea. It’s worse than coffee. He stops trying to brew things entirely. He learns how to cook a few things from wikihow, then from the foodnetwork, then from a local class. 

He drags Jonny to museums, and can’t believe he’s never been to the Museum of Science of Industry. Jonny’s been to them all, but he never says a word of complaint, even when Patrick spends an hour in a kids activity exhibit on robots. They go the the Shedd Aquarium. He likes the dolphin show, it seems more humane and natural than the kind he’s seen at Sea World.

He goes to the doctor. He goes to PT. He takes his medicine. He hates it all; but he does it.

He slowly gains weight back, although most of it not in muscle. He has a pudgy belly now, but Jonny doesn’t seem to mind and Patrick knows that one day Jonny’ll have a pudgy belly too. 

He gets a cat. Her name is Whiskers, and she is fat and mean spirited. He loves her. Jonny wants a dog, but they’re waiting till they have a real house. They’re looking in the Lincoln Park area. It’s nice. Residential. Patrick wants kids. He tells Jonny one day, and they smile at each other like two idiots for far too long.

Patrick is, better. His wrist hurts, and his back, and his knee. He can tell when it’s going to rain, and there are some days when his back locks, and he can’t get out of bed. He manages. Jonny helps.

He watches hockey. He misses it, but when he sees Jonny on his screen, it gets a little better. He’s working up to actually going to a game. Eventually, maybe. One day he takes one of his sticks from out his closet, and a worn stickhandling ball. It doesn’t end well. His wrist burns for a week, and Jonny finds him sobbing in the hallway.

He’s been in worse places. 

A year passes. 

They have sex for the first time; Patrick refuses to bottom and pulls his back out. There are tears.

They manage.

Patrick learns bottoming isn’t all that bad.

Another year passes.

They have a house in Lincoln Park, a little too big for them, but they have plans. Patrick tries gardening. He hates it just as much as he hates coffee and tea. He leaves the gardening to Jonny, who takes pride in his small herb garden, and is eager to expand out into vegetables. Patrick adamantly refuses to be involved, but he does make it known that carving home grown pumpkins would be cool. Jonny obliges. They have a mini fridge full of blue gatorade. Patrick learns to make crepes. They’re better than Jonny’s. It causes a rift between them for a week, before Jonny learns to let it go and Patrick learns to stop instigating fights. They learn a lot of things, and Patrick spends an alarming amount of time on wikihow. He entertains the idea of buying a tiger cub. Jonny puts an end to it with a puppy. Patrick worries Whiskers wont take to him, but they get along well enough. He approaches Jonny carefully after dinner one night, strangely afraid, and asks about therapy dog training. Jonny is quick to approve, and, as he does in many things, obliges Patrick. Patrick leaves his laptop open on the kitchen table, to a company that builds custom in ground pools that convert to ice rinks in the winter. Jonny takes the hint.

He pays an ungodly amount of money to make it happen in time for the following winter but, come December Patrick steps onto the ice for the first time in three years. He cries. Jonny cries too. He lives on that rink until March. Jonny suggests going to the training center. Patrick thinks about it, but only for Jonny. He can’t go back to that ice.

In the summer, they stay in the city, and he spends so much time in the pool, he never quite stops being sunburned. They’re back and forth between adoption and surrogacy. They make up a kids bedroom. They’ll figure it out. They have plans.

It’s better. It’s getting better.

**Author's Note:**

> I've just been feeling really down about this series and I needed to cleanse and get the bad mojo out. I'll try to put up something more positive soon to balance it out though.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Feel free to check out my tumblr, same handle.


End file.
